Remember the Big Society? It was the big fluffy idea that blew in stage right with the Coalition then blew off stage left like so much tumbleweed before anyone could get a handle on what it might possibly mean. A proposed integration of free market ideology harnessed to the workhorse of social solidarity, in case you didn’t get that first time round, and all dependent on a spirit of voluntarism. Thank you Wiki. So that’s DIY governance as opposed to governance by the people you voted for (or not) to govern, a little like serving yourself in the supermarket instead of having someone there whose job it would be to serve you. It was a plan that turned out to be neither particularly big nor especially social, but the team that brought you the Big Society were not to be deterred and have been hard at work ever since on their next major production, the Tiny State. But despite all this, and the irrationality of austerity to boot, the Coalition have still managed to stumble upon two bright ideas in five years that might enhance the prospect of greater social cohesion. Even a stopped clock tells the right time twice a day.

The first was David Cameron’s personal declaration of war on the barriers to adoption of children in care. In 2012 there was, in his view, ‘no more pressing’ concern for government. Up until the end of last year the campaign enjoyed sustained success, seeing an apparent 60% rise in the number of children finding loving homes since its introduction. Though the campaign has stalled in recent months, following concerns regarding a raft of ‘sloppy’ applications and a rush to adopt when in many situations other solutions might better apply, the Prime Ministerial mission to remove previously pedantic and often insurmountable obstacles facing would-be adoptive parents remains admirable.

The second prominent member of the Coalition to trip over a good idea lately is a less likely candidate as he’s not so much an ideas man as an ideologue – Ian Duncan Smith. His outriders in the DWP are piloting men only relationship classes which will run in tandem with regular antenatal courses. The stated aim is to save children from the near-certain fate that the DWP’s research points to – more likely at sixteen to have a smartphone to hand than a father.

We know that politicians, particularly those on the right, have long looked to the family unit as the fundamental building block of social cohesion. But the nuclear family has long since mutated and evolved, in a great many cases, into something far more flexible and resilient. It’s widening its gene pool, if you like. Sadly many politicians, yes particularly those on the right, have yet to fully grasp this.

IDS and his merry band of social engineers are focusing with surgical precision on the father in a shift away from the traditional mother-centric model that, ironically, comes at a time when more and more men are involved with childcare in any case. And though it is still framed very much within the context of strengthening the family unit of yore beloved still of Westminster, it signals at least a recognition of the particular importance of a male parent beyond the tasks he’s historically been charged (or charged himself) with – hunter-gathering, or more latterly breadwinning, barbecue-lighting, roast-carving, broken toy fixing, handing down lore, crashing about in the shed to no great effect on Sundays, swearing in the cupboard beneath the stairs, etc,…

There can be nothing more catastrophic for a boy than the father he’s afraid of, or the father who simply doesn’t care. Better then that the father isn’t there at all. In the case of my own father, it was difficult to know whether he was there or not. He lived among us, the evidence was irrefutable. There was the drinking, incessant and not one drop in his lifetime truly savoured, shared or enjoyed, just an ongoing isolated act of inoculation against life that infected all those around him, repeated joylessly and robotically until self-medication segued into self-destruction. The squalid outcome, dad sitting dead in an armchair at 60, seems now to have been inevitable. Though it lacked a single defining action, it was suicide all the same, only passive rather than proactive. Rather than resolve to take his life, he simply let it go.

Then there was the rage. Seismic, fuelled by fear and loathing, hurled like a weapon and always shocking as though new no matter how often it came upon you. You forgot it, you pretended it never happened while praying it wouldn’t happen again. Then it happened again. And again and again. When it possessed him the air thickened and congealed and the walls of a small suburban house shrank and wrapped themselves around me. There was no escape – this was what happened, ‘this was your father’. Often there was a perverse twist. To be shouted at or chastised for some perceived misdemeanour was one thing, but to be threatened with crucifixion, to offer just one example, was quite something else. ‘I’ll crucify you’ – that was the shrapnel that stayed in the wound, and sometimes when my boy dandles on my lap and thoughts of my father filter through three decades on, those words can still play in my mind’s ear, and I can feel a deep and unsettling bewilderment that a father could ever have directed those words at his son.

As he slid into his fifties and I trod warily into my teens his anger dissipated. Where once it had gorged on itself, it now lay dormant, sodden with alcohol and thankfully less flammable. I grew out of the fear, for with age came a recognition that his anger was nothing more than a volcanic expression of impotence. And once he saw that I knew that, the game was up, and the chasm between us widened. But an undertow of shame took hold as he tipped into steep decline, a shame that deepened with each of a succession of incidents as a private hell was dragged out into the open. There were numerous disappearances and he would frequently be found blind drunk on neighbours or friends doorsteps. He was caught shoplifting in the local Sainsbury’s when it was the only way left for him to get whisky, following a naive attempt to confiscate his money. I once saved him from choking in a pool of his own vomit. The fact that it was ultimately pointless to do so still jags. For a faltering teenager these disgraces were impossible to digest, so I hid them from myself and from everyone else, too. I would go to great lengths to deter friends from visiting me at home, and only one ever succeeded in meeting my father.

But still you would cling on to whatever could be salvaged from the wreckage. It was better than facing the truth, that one of the two people responsible for your wellbeing was actually a threat to it. Each Wednesday at 9.00 we would watch M*A*S*H together. For 25 minutes sandwiched between instrumental takes of Johnny Mandel’s ‘Suicide Is Painless’ the distance between us would recede just a little, and a narrow window onto my father’s inner life would open up. The BBC had wisely dropped the American laughter track, and prompted by his snorts and guffaws I began to glean the subtext of a richer and more complex world, the world of the adult. Amid the young lives lost, the wise-cracking and the cracking up, the unrequited lust and the quest for the perfect vodka Martini, I realised I was yearning for what wasn’t there, reaching out to hold a hand that wasn’t offered.

That weekly observance and two trips to the match to watch my beloved Liverpool play in London marked the extent of our endeavours in bonding. The weeks of anticipation curdled inside me as the side that conquered the eighties stumbled to uncharacteristic defeats on both occasions. Maintaining a silence of convenience as we sat among the home support – my father refused the away end, leaving me with a wait of a few more years before I hurled myself among that happy heaving throng – I couldn’t help but feel the results on the field were confirmation that our outings were somehow ill starred, and in among the denizens of a hostile Stamford Bridge I certainly didn’t feel safe.

There was a reckoning before he died. Though I’d been spared the brunt of the physical violence he’d meted on older siblings, our relationship, such as it was, jerked continuously from one stand-off to the next. In his last months, with my mother now dead and with some sense in me that his descent was gaining irreversible momentum, I sought an answer to the question that chewed on me, ‘do you care? do you love me?’. These confrontations were in the main like a dance, a choreography of distance observed warily by both parties. I was, I see now, afraid of losing control, and fearful also of showing how much it mattered. And on the one occasion I wouldn’t let him walk away, when I pressed home my insistence, we tussled and in the struggle to remove his hand from my throat I pushed and he fell backwards to the floor. As the back of his skull connected with the linoleum covered floor, I heard a sound like the flat thud of a poorly inflated basketball on an indoor court. It was a dead sound with no trace of an echo, it simply lodged in my gut as the low whirring whine of the fridge filled the kitchen.

And there I was, on my knees beside him, whimpering for him, in thrall to a father who cared nothing for me, and praying that I hadn’t killed him. After a moment he stirred, stood, composed himself and walked out, as though after an afternoon nap in his armchair. There was time for one last dance, and finally I got my answer. ‘No’, came the reply. ‘No, I don’t care.’ And I could see that it was true. Something had receded from within him, finally. What little light there had been of late in his eyes was gone, and the words were delivered in a flat monotone, a simple statement of fact from an automaton. There could be no answer. It was my turn to walk out.

That hand clamped around my throat is still the only physical contact with my father that I can recall. Now, I can barely get my son Leo in or out of his pyjamas for the cascade of hugs. That last dance in the kitchen left a blank space that was filled in over time with drugs and alcohol, but mostly with anger. With Leo it’s now brimming, finally, with love. My inheritance had been a debilitating shame and uncertainty. There was a gap of twenty-two years between my father’s death and the birth of my son. It took twenty-two years to see what was blindingly obvious, what I’d hidden from myself for all that time, that the presence of a good or even decent father is transformative.

Whatever the outcome of the DWP’s pilots, I feel compelled to applaud Ian Duncan Smith. That’s a strange feeling, but there’s little doubt in my mind that, whatever the shape of the family, the bond between fathers and sons might be the glue that’s missing in society. There’s a wayward emphasis on the need for ‘positive role models’ when we talk about those most likely to be listless or gravitate towards gangs – a society that’s looking towards footballers or musicians to carry the torch is getting something badly wrong. Let them set an example, but a continuous male presence from the get-go that isn’t corrosive is a decent start. The role models need to be in the next seat, not on the pitch. And let’s not kid ourselves that problems of male identity are confined to those sections of society that are, unfortunately, most likely to produce fodder for street gangs. A pack mentality that’s fuelling an alarming and dangerous attitude towards women is in evidence on campuses across the UK and the States. That’s an altogether different demographic, but away from those examples and across mainstream society the restrictive male type, a compound made up of the usual constituent parts – beer, sport and sex – still holds the centre ground. Meet the new lad, same as the old lad. It’s a straight jacket that many are silently squeezed into, and they need to speak up.

It’s a curious state of affairs. There was a time when stereotypical male culture seemed to face a challenge from within, when Lennon reconstructed himself, put away the lad and placed a woman at the centre of his universe, and Bowie like a chimera challenged and upended every preconceived notion of what a man could or should be. With some exceptions, men we might admire or aspire to have melted away from the magazine covers to be replaced with the women we’re told we want.

At the more extreme end of the spectrum, crises in male identity can be of grave danger. Perhaps it’s stretching things just a little, but I’d suggest we might be a step closer to freedom from the threat of jihadism if every Al-Qaeda operative or ISIS-inspired zombie had enjoyed the benefits of being carried around in a papoose by his daddy. But to those young men who find themselves shunted to one side, puttering around the periphery of mainstream society on a pizza delivery bike, adrift and without purpose, it’s clear that death can hold more meaning than life. They’re prey to the morbid siren of martyrdom and ripe to become fodder. Suzanne Moore, writing in The Guardian, was onto something when she described ISIS as a kind of ‘homo-erotic death cult’.

And while there’s growing evidence to suggest that young women are not mere groupies in these organisations, indeed it seems they are playing key roles, what’s beyond doubt is that ruthless and well-funded people with clear aims are seeding a message of hate to capitalise on the insecurities of the marginalised male. We can’t discount the importance of economics in this either, but in the absence of a hug from dad, a positive role model close to home, or some conduit for channeling testosterone and a deep seated yearning to belong into something more imaginative than a headlong rush into a personal apocalypse, then gangs on the street or viral networks of terrorists can only ever swell in number.

As strongly as I’d advocate equality of opportunity for both men and women, I’d be tempted to see an experiment in global role-reversal in which over a period of, say, a decade, men got domestic while women got busy establishing a kind of worldwide gynocracy. I think I’d vote for that. We mightn’t get to Utopia within ten years, but by tweaking the micro-model we may see a macro-benefit and I’d hazard a guess that the planet might just be on the way to a more peaceful and prosperous destination.

I estimate I’ve changed my son Leo’s nappies around 3,000 times now, and while I’d be lying if I said I enjoyed it every time, I’ve been aware with each wipe of his bum of a kind of incremental strengthening of the bond between us. I’ve fed him, bathed him, dressed him, brushed his teeth and comforted him, read to him and hoisted him up onto my aching shoulders on countless occasions. I’ve gone days at a time with him in my sole care and each time I’ve been dimly aware that, in terms of bonding, all of this has been just as valuable – if not more – to his wellbeing and our relationship as a kick about in the park at the weekend. I’d recommend it.

Globally, nationally, domestically, the relationship between father and son, or sons and their male carers, is the link in the chain which, if strengthened, can be of lasting benefit for all. Any initiative, at whatever scale, that brings that prospect a little closer to reality is to be lauded. Society might be about to get a little bigger…

Leo has visited his first tantrum upon us, or rather ‘us’, and suddenly I see the word for what it is – a euphemism. Tantrum – it leaves a dark and spindly imprint on the page but in common usage it’s throwaway, light, and entirely disproportionate to the debilitating impact felt by the parent. It’s a limp, flaccid term that does no justice to what it purports to describe – an explosion of the will, a demonstration of shock and awe, a body and soul unbridled, a volcanic reaction that leaves me to wonder whether the restraint learnt in later life might be the greatest of human virtues. Long before Leo I’d witnessed twins in a kind of tantrum in tandem. It was like watching a form of self exorcism in stereo, as if each child were attempting to hurl itself out of its own body.

But I didn’t witness this one. Leo’s first, and so far only, tantrum was for his mother to deal with alone. I’d enjoyed an early winter Wednesday with him. Swimming in the morning, on to the library, shopping, lunch at home, a scheduled nap (for us both, mine far shorter than his), then a turn around the park before dark and finally dinner. With a little time to kill before Ellie arrived to pick him up, we cosied up on the sofa with the iPad to catch a few minutes of Pocoyo, the surreal adventures of a computer animated toddler who has captivated Leo of late. A recent habit, this, and I’ve rediscovered the lost joys of bonding through TV. For fifteen minutes it’s just the two of us, fifteen minutes that seem almost eternal. I’m aware, as I am so often with Leo, of how precious our time together is, how great the tenderness I feel towards him.

My awareness of this doesn’t crowd the moment but it’s constant nonetheless, like an app running in the background. It’s as though I’m recording. The smell of his hair evokes something close to déjà vu but deeper, a scent that’s somehow always been familiar to me. For a while I watch him as he watches. I’m pleased to see he’s not hypnotised but focused and concentrated, amused, delighted and engaged, and I recall in some vague way a magazine piece I’d recently read about the careful conception of programmes like these and their stimulating qualities. Suddenly in my mind there’s no yesterday or tomorrow, nothing but this moment, and nowhere else to be. Then Ellie is at the door.

Leo, as is his habit during these moments of handover, flits from the parent clocking out to the one clocking in, then skitters away like a skimming stone, as if inviting a chase. There’s no cry of ‘MUMMEEE!’ this time, no hurling himself forward into her embrace. It’s a dance, a kind of flirtation, it’s as if he’s circling before landing. And on this occasion, once he’s caught and shoed, he seems to recede a little as we wrap him and pack him into his buggy. As I squat down to him I wonder, not for the first time, how he finds these moments of handover in the hallway – moments stretched by his parents’ fumble for small talk as they strike poses unfamiliar to each other, hands on hips or in pockets. These brief moments are, by and large, his only experience of us together, or at least standing in the same space for a moment or two, and they are for him just interludes. He leans forward, straining against the straps, and grants me a faintly regal peck on the cheek for me before he’s trundled off into the night.

I have no cause for concern until a shaken Ellie phones two hours later. In the intervening time, throughout the bus journey and at home, Leo has kicked out, punched and screamed, fled from his mother, reduced her to tears and left her feeling – in her own words – ‘powerless’ and ‘hated.’ And, through it all, he screamed for me.

I’m perturbed by the news. Tantrums, it seems, are no longer the preserve of other people’s children. Even as I listen and reassure, paranoia grips. Can this have anything to do with the difference in his bedtime routines at her place and mine? I allow him to fall asleep on my chest after reading him a story or two – a shared primal pleasure I’ve given up resisting, but anathema to his mother, and indeed her mother in turn, for reasons I’m not sure I can grasp but I’m certain I can’t agree with – could he be angry that she doesn’t?

We talk it through, sifting through the evidence and teasing out the theories. I tell her about the day we’d had, how average it seemed, not exactly a Disney day, and how I felt I’d been ‘phoning it in’, as a distracted parent might often feel. I stay silent on our differing approaches to bedtime, knowing that he’d already cried for me at the end of the day two or three weeks previously. As I listen I realise that for the first time we are discussing in detail how we are as parents, how Leo is with us both one on one, how, for example, he talks about and calls for me when he’s with her. Odd as it may seem, this is news to me. He so often mentions mummy, and even on occasion James, that I’d simply assumed I was the odd one out, that they were ‘the family’ as it were and I was the babysitter, that his true home wasn’t here but there. Of course it was only an assumption, and a false one at that, but one easily compounded by the insecurity brought on by an ugly separation. Now I discover that ‘home’ is a word he uses as often with them. Clearly, then, he feels he has two homes.

I ask Ellie if she ever has concerns about Leo’s constant movement between us, between homes. She reveals that she has. This, too, is news and a fault line of fear yawns before me – for all the love that he soaks up between the two of us – or rather the three of us – do we risk destabilising him? Are we embarked on a course that’s essentially transgressive? Can ‘home’ divide into two? Already she’s been online but I counsel against Google, and having approached the topic from every angle we’re left to remind ourselves that tantrums happen anyway, that Leo is now on the cusp another fluffy parental euphemism – the terrible twos.

If I had to grasp for the reassurance of a reason, I’d rationalise it thus – Leo was interrupted, simple as that. On a cold night, with the wind beating the glass panes of the living room and a nice meal tucked inside him, cuddling up to his old dad with his favourite show, he was uprooted just as he thought he was settled in for the night. As far as he was concerned, in the natural sequence of events, pyjamas and bedtime story came next, followed by the sweet nothing of ten hours sleep. That didn’t happen, and Mum got the blowback.

But so much for the rationale. Beneath this there’s another, deeper fear, as yet unspoken and I know it must plague Ellie in the wake of this. Under different circumstances, ie had we not separated, a tantrum would be just that and only that – a tantrum. But the dynamics of separation can amplify your fears to the point of distortion. There’s little doubt she was the object of his fury, she’d taken him from away from dad, and how must it have felt for her to hear ‘DADDYDADDYDADDY!’ hurled at her until it reverberated around the room and right through her? Any father in the firing line of his toddler’s ire, with the word ‘MUMMY’ used for ammo, might no doubt pass it all off as natural; tricky to negotiate but easy to understand as a child’s righteous yearning for its mother. But the other way round? Inevitably, there’ll be a feeling that this subverts the order of things. And that order of things is a useless nonsense of course, it’s just that despite ourselves we still largely subscribe to it.

The great unspoken, then, is that it could be an early expression of preference; it is the spectre of his choice. In a carrier or a buggy, he’s been a passenger but with a mind of his own, a burgeoning character blessed with full locomotive ability, then later an Oyster card and eventually a driving licence, he’ll be at liberty to act on that choice. And whilst it’s natural for any child to form a closer bond with one parent than the other, within the context of a relationship that becomes a strain, at worst. When you’ve separated in the most testing of circumstances, however, a child’s natural preference will have more profound implications; a subtext of competition, of winning and losing, can fester unacknowledged. I’d always gone on the assumption that Leo would bask in the reflective glow of his mother’s new found love, and perhaps he does, but it may well be that my undivided attention suits him better. Who, for now, can tell? Just wait until he can really talk…

As we talk there’s a stab of immaturity through my heart, the inevitable legacy of all the insecurity I felt in the wake another man’s arrival in the life of my still unborn child. It’s shameful to admit to, but privately I feel relief. It’s as if the whole incident has laid bare the true nature of Leo’s relationship with me. For two years I’ve plodded along, head down, from day to day, caring for him and laying the foundations for what, I couldn’t be sure. For us, I suppose. James’s presence as – whatever he feels he is – in Leo’s life was, of course, deeply undermining and I couldn’t feel I could take for granted my position with my own son. Now I see the depth of my insecurity, though I can hardly blame myself for it. Leo’s familiarity with James stretches back, after all, even until his time in the womb, of that I’m certain. There were days I wondered if he’d even know which one his father was, if he’d need coaching or prompting, and in the early days there was a little of that. But now it seems locked down, and the attachment is primal after all. And here is the final confirmation of what I’ve felt for a little while now, that he’s my boy, and I’m stunned to find myself at the centre of his universe. ‘Daddydaddydaddy!’ is all I ever hear at times, and it’s music to me, it’s just I never thought it might be all his mother would hear, too…

So there’s relief as my insecurities are allayed but concern for Ellie, too. I still care, how could I not? Whatever happened next, we made the best thing that’s ever happened to me. But my concern is a pragmatic one, it’s a concern for the part she has to play. On a personal level we’ve retreated from one another, but as parents we will always need each other, we’re locked in.

Already, in the days since, Ellie has dropped a night with Leo in favour of a night at the cinema. I appreciate her working life militates against a movie, and that her partner now has health concerns, but nonetheless I find this disquieting. I, meanwhile, feel unable to turn down time with my son and when, a few days later, I find myself at short notice with even more time on duty I’m left to ponder. When we hand over, Leo seems happy to be back in harness with me, and I wonder whether Ellie is relieved or if I’m imagining it. There’s no denying her confidence has taken a knock, but I need her back on the horse and so does Leo. She’s his mum. But any festering doubts on her part, and we’ll have an ‘issue’.

For myself I have no such fears. This isn’t even a phase yet and there’s no reason at all that it won’t be me on the receiving end next time, of course, but somehow I can’t see it. And there’s no point bracing myself for it either, if it happens I’ll go along with Dr. Miriam Stoppard – put him in another room, make sure he has a route back to me and take him in my arms when he comes. I just hope we’re not on the bus.

But there’s a calm assurance building within me with each passing day now, an innate sense that we’ll be just fine, explosive interludes or not. It’s like we know each other…

6.45 am and my eyes snap open. In the murk before dawn, there’s little to see. I’ve woken off kilter, as though I’ve forgotten how to do it. I’m not convinced that I’ve even slept at all. Crash landed in the new day. Thoughts fly in unbidden and instantly I’m sixteen years ahead of myself, wondering how I’ll be making money when Leo turns 18 and I’m 60; when he’s up and gone and with him the child benefit and tax credits. It’s a kind of preemptive fear and it’s ludicrous, but I can’t quite bring myself to laugh. I’m right to be concerned – I’m as close to 60 now as to 28 and heading in the wrong direction, and becoming a single parent has left my finances in a patchwork state with the loss of any constituent part potentially disastrous, but there’s time to turn it around, surely? If there is time, it’s slipping away from me, down the cracks between the days, lost somewhere between work and Leo. It feels as if the thought has had me, not the other way round. That’s single parenting – no one to listen, no one to tell you you’re paranoid, and too busy to dwell on anything but the child before you until the quiet moments in the dark when the big picture assails you.

Thankfully Leo is awake and calling me by 6.45 – ‘DAAA-DEEEE’ from the cot in the next room and I take instant advantage and heed the clarion call, whipping him over the wooden rails for a hug and a kiss. For a time I struggled to adjust to his fresh starts, holding on tight to the comfort blanket of my late nights, but these days I’m ready and waiting for his summons. By 7.00 we’re cosy together in bed and read Dinosaurs After Dark and Dr Seuss’s The Lorax before a breakfast of porridge, blueberries, yoghurt and Maple syrup. I’ve been a dad for 808 days now, most of them, thankfully, spent with my son, and every one of them single.

After a brisk shower we head south to the Horniman Museum on Forest Hill. We’re first through the doors and head into the bowels of the building to explore African tribal artefacts – tall glass cases dense with twentieth century masks and costumes. Leo skitters in the gloom between exhibits, hiding between my legs in delighted mock terror from gaggles of adoring schoolgirls. Much ooh-ing and aah-ing – always appreciated, however familiar it’s become. We stop in the gents for a sharp nappy change and even the school boys are taken, ‘aw! So cute!’ We take in the stuffed menagerie in the galleries upstairs, a fusty collection of taxidermied beasts. Foxes and lions snarl in mute defiance, petrified for all time. Leo and I hold hands before the skeletons of an early Homo Sapiens adult and child. A mummy skull and a baby skull stare back, slack-jawed as if in disbelief that they found themselves here and I try to imagine how they lived, how they died, what they saw. Was there anything more for them than a brief and brutal struggle between birth and death, or did they laugh and sing? We duck down into the basement rooms and play music together before we’re ousted by a group of adults with special needs who make a sweet cacophony of their own.

Then out to the gardens on the hill overlooking the city where I hoist Leo up onto my shoulders and teach him the names of all the herbs and vegetables – ‘parsley, cabbage, chard, …I, love, you.’ I remember the old Fast Show sketch when the laird declares his love for old Ted and we play it out for ourselves, ‘I – potato – love – cabbage – you. Chard.’ Satisfied, we both nod off on the bus home, as we always seem to after the Horniman, but all the while something is building in me. Resentment towards Ellie, and worse. A kind of hostility. Anger at being left alone as a parent without even having felt what it might be to parent with a partner, to have to guess at what your own family might feel like. A father in exile.

Back at the flat, Leo stirs in the buggy. He’s not slept nearly enough and we struggle through lunch. He takes it as an affront and I can’t blame him. And all the while there’s something of my own I can’t digest. The situation, to put it euphemistically, the struggle. In the main it’s fine, I could even say I love it, but but there are times when I crave a break. Not from Leo, never from Leo, but a break from the cycle of chores, work and relentless hustle that supports us both. Some perspective. A hug from someone who isn’t two. Once the injustice of lunch is over I lay him down in his IKEA cot where he finally returns to the business sleep, just before his mother arrives. She’s dropping off his scooter and picking up flowers delivered here for her partner James, who it seems has been diagnosed with arthritis. Briefly I consider what the implications of this might be.

She pokes her head around Leo’s bedroom door before stopping to chat for a moment in the kitchen. We discuss the new wellies I’m about to buy for Leo and she dips into her blue leather handbag to show me her current reading, a true life account of an allied soldier’s war. We rarely wander off topic and my mind, for once, is unreceptive to suggestions for new reading matter. The details of the book, usually taken in as if by osmosis, elude me. I’m edgy, hovering between the need to have her leave and some nameless need to have her stay. She’s still his mother…

We hold eye contact momentarily, something that’s been a struggle lately – whether for her I’m unsure, but certainly for me. Suddenly I remember, as if in flashback, who she was and who we were; both of us used to be somebody else, more than just separated parents being admirably sensible, that we shared over a decade of our lives before the switch to parallel tracks, that there wasn’t once a vacuum between us. I haven’t remembered ‘us’ for a while. And then whatever it is that’s lodged in my gut today, the animus fuelled by injustice now grown hard like a gall stone, melts. I cannot hold onto it.

We say goodbye after she’s checked in on Leo again, who’s slept throughout. I take the chance for a quick nap myself, ten minutes of black to slingshot me back into the day. Instead I find myself sitting on the edge of the bed crying. I’m not sure why, but it’s as if a wall has come down. I can’t find it in me to hate. Most of the time I’m strong enough not to – most of the time – but it’s visited me in my weakness today. Tired of the effort of being alone, vaguely hypoglycaemic and hunched like a dray horse over a buggy that seems to be pushing back, I’ve caved in. Fleetingly I recall the hoary nugget of wisdom from a divorcee I once watched interviewed for a TV documentary, ‘love your children more than you hate your ex.’ I’m running a marathon with my ex here, and now feels like the time to stop sprinting and drop the animosity. It’s giving me a stitch.

It’s a kind of refuge, hate, an invisible shield that costs energy to maintain – energy which, at 44, I can’t afford to waste. I can’t hate her, I can’t hate being left high and dry on the cusp of family life, I can’t hate paying London rent for a two bedroom flat while she plans an extension, I can’t hate the mornings I wake and remember he’s not with me, I can’t hate never coming home to him. I can’t hate the glimpses I catch through the curtains of my son in a stranger’s arms. I can’t hate the fact that here I am, high and dry, behold the reconstructed male, in fact the male that never needed a real overhaul, who was raised by his mum and sister, who never needed to be taught to respect women, who was faithful if perhaps the flame was flickering, who was class swat at antenatal, who held hands at the scans and wiped the vomit off the floor after the jabs and dutifully massaged his pregnant partner even as she rapidly and dramatically became his ex partner, and who learnt to look after a baby on his own.

I’m brimming with love for my son. Most of the time the only struggle is to believe I had a hand in his creation. At times it can destabilise me to think that the intimacy I share with my son runs in tandem with the intimacy he shares with someone who remains an outsider in my life, and that while he’s my entire world, I’m but a part of his. But mercifully I’m too busy for such thoughts to remain in focus. When it’s us, it’s just us. The phone, to my frequent relief, puts the cushion of distance between me and his mother, and with physical proximity and all it brings back removed from the equation, the wonder of it is still visits me – we made someone, we made him. And if our hearts are unbound, then he carries them both.

Leo’s awake before I can quite squeeze off the nap I need. But I swing my legs over the side of the bed, feeling a little lighter all the same. For a brief and sudden instant I miss all that we were, and in my mind I see all that we could have been, everything I’ve blocked out. She was my girl. But that was then. In the three strides from my room to his I skip from the slough of the past and leaning down to his cot, and I doubt I could even find it in me to hate Man Utd. I swing him up and over for the second time in a day and squeeze him tight.

Whenever asked how many children I’d ideally like to have, by Ellie or whoever else, I always fell back on the same tired joke – ‘Three. One of each.’ The two of us spoke so often about having children and from such an early stage of our relationship that it seemed the only matter to be resolved was the number. It was as though the future were already written. In our minds the kids were already beautifully clad and suitably named. There was no ‘if’.

Later that worn out line was to resolve itself into the germ of a grand idea. Why not have three, indeed? And why not one of each? A boy, a girl, and an orphan. I’d struck upon the plan at a party thrown to celebrate the tenth anniversary of a restaurant I’d once worked at. Happy and hugger-mugger with friends amid a throng of faces old and new, with barely room to raise a glass mouthwards, elbows pinned to our sides and every word shouted over the cheery din that hung in the air, a couple we knew – happily married and busy raising the archetypal nuclear family – quizzed me on family plans. Madonna had been kicking up headlines at the time by adopting a young Malawian named David Banda, and swept along by the spirit of giddy – and faintly unrealistic – anticipation and generosity which the subject of kids aroused in us then, I suggested we might perhaps like to follow suit and give a home to a child whose need was great.

Initially my companions were confused and assumed my puppyish eagerness to consider adoption might have arisen out of a problem – were we unable to have kids of our own, they wondered? I assured them that wasn’t so, arguing the case instead for altruism. It was myself I was convincing, of course. Though my views haven’t changed to this day – in the face of arguments against interfering do-gooders trying to throw their arms around the world by rescuing but one child, and in doing so breaking the hearts of the many, I would always contend that if you have it in your power to change, if not the world, then one child’s world, do so. One child is never ‘just’ one child.

But how relieved I am now, for all the upheaval of the last two or three years, that our future remained unwritten and the blue pen was taken to the script. Our reality proved in the end to be little more than stage scenery, a construct whose removal caused havoc in my life for no short time. But destruction is often the first act of creation, and a brutal and beautiful reality at least has filled the void. ‘The truth will set you free but first it will make you miserable’ – whoever said it first, James A Garfield or Gloria Steinem, it bears repeating. There was to be no orphan to take its place alongside the girl/boy axis of our nuclear family. There’s just Leo. And of course he can never be ‘just’ Leo.

How glad I am to be off-plan once more, to be swept up again in life’s currents, however buffeting the ride. What could have been more anti-life than to plan a family? How I regret that we’d opted to terminate a pregnancy in the summer of 2005, a promise of life that Ellie had sensed as we drove an exhilarating 3,000 mile loop of open road through every conceivable combination of weather and terrain, beginning and ending in San Francisco. It had been and remains the adventure of my life thus far; it seemed the road was rising to meet us. In Istanbul Liverpool had won the Champions League for the first time since my childhood in a manner that could only be described as miraculous, and I could hardly read that as anything else than an augury that life was opening up, the future bright and welcoming as the Californian sunlight. Could there have been a happier way to conceive?

And though I felt terror when we returned to London and a positive test, in my gut I still wanted the ride. I demurred and took on the passive role of support as I felt was right – or I felt was expected, I have never been sure – it was her body, and consequently her decision. Not for many years was I to register the distinction that it was in her body. ‘I want more time for just the two of us’, Ellie said. We’d had four years to ourselves. How much time did we want? We took our time, we agonised, and afterwards we moved on. I cannot know what Ellie endured alone, and have nothing but respect for her decision. And there is no percentage in weighing up the parallel life, or pondering what might have been for us. How can I care for what’s never been?

But soon I was to understand why friends would urge me to get on with it. Among all of my contemporaries or, to be more specific, the guys I played five-a-side with on Tuesday nights, only I was yet to start a family. When asked in no uncertain terms ‘so when are you going to whip the johnnies off, then?’ I could only blush and splutter into my beer, frothing about the insecurities of money and work. I thought, of course, that I was being sensible, putting the horse before the cart as it were. I saw it as dangerously lazy to assume that ‘everything would fall into place’ around a baby. I’d been missing the point. I was getting in the way of my own path. I’d allowed myself to be lulled into thinking about life as though it were a profession.

And now that I’m on the other side, how can I possibly think of a child as a mistake?

As for the notion that we ought to live our lives without the taint of regret, that’s the stuff of popular song and the tyrannical mantra of self development. Far more heroic, I think, to admit to regrets. To acknowledge them and move on. Give them a quick cuddle, even. They’re part of us. The failure is to live in them, to dwell in the house of regret, as it were.

Now, even though I don’t have what I’d hoped for, I’m contemptuous of the notion that we ought to do anything but live with the unintended consequences of our lives, however duty-bound we may feel. If anything, I’ve been liberated by living the life of the single parent even if it has been thrust upon me. I’ve come to see the stark differences in our respective approaches to parenting, where once there was only cosy consensus. I’ve awoken alone, apart from from the reverie we once shared to discover that I’m no longer a part of the me generation school. In fact I never was. It’s as though I’ve come to my senses.

I’m relieved to put Leo first, struggling not with the long days I spend alone with him but the infinitely longer hours away, cut adrift from the purpose I feel primed for. The empty flat I dread returning to, eerie in its emptiness, the lifeless aspect of the toys tossed to one side and the suffocating blanket of silence left in his wake – those are the shadows I wrestle with. The claustrophobic sense that for all the work, for all the love, the cushion of hearth and home has been whipped away at the very moment I was sitting back on it. Just as my heart has grown with the birth of my son, so too a layer has been stripped off of me…

The future used to be a map, now it’s not much more than a morass of entangled permutations that refuses to be read and there is little percentage in thinking too far ahead. Not long ago, short of breath as I ran to the nursery clutching spare clothes for Leo, I ran into an old flame at the gates. She had been and still is the most beautiful woman I’ve seen in my life, her luminous face had hammered through my heart long after our affair had petered out. How odd, how nice, so many years after I’d found myself at times almost incapable even of coherent speech as she shone before me and my heart threatened to batter its way free from my chest, to see us cross paths so briefly as she dropped off the youngest of her three children. Hearing my story, she cocked her head to one side and offered up her sympathy. ‘Oh, that’s… shit. That really is shit.’ I insisted on cheery disagreement, feeling particularly English that morning, though I still wonder about what she had to say next. ‘But it’s ok for guys, you know. You can keep on having kids.’

At 44 that seems like a possibility, if only technically. With my life now out of joint with those of my friends, whose children are by and large older, and virtually all of my time without Leo spent working, this hardly seems ‘the best of both worlds’. That was the vision of my future Ellie saw. It was Panglossian in the extreme; indeed it’s she who enjoys the best of both worlds, able as she is to devote time to her new relationship. It certainly seems the ‘best of all possible worlds’ when I’m with Leo but without him it’s a grind and a social life of any real kind, never mind a love life, requires a lot of imagination and time I no longer have.

The idea of more children is a fine one, but I sense it might remain just that. And I wonder whether two kids means twice the happiness; does the joy increase exponentially? Having Leo has brought completion, and yet paradoxically I’m entirely alone in that feeling. The odds certainly favour Ellie for now. As much as I hope for a brother or sister for Leo, and the broader base of love and support that would continue to offer him into the future, I find myself selfishly calculating the effects. Would another child for Ellie establish a family unit from which Leo would resent being separated when with me? Or would he revel in the undivided attention which only I could then offer him?

With a largely sublime dynamic between the two of us cemented I’m loathe to shatter it and even the prospect of a partner would feel intrusive in some way. It feels almost impossible that I could admit someone into the nights he spends sleeping here, however sensible that might be in some respects. Having been made a single parent before his birth has engendered a strong determination in me to go it alone and to have him to myself, to the extent I often find myself daydreaming of all the circumstances that might lead to that. But there’s also a fragility to being alone as a parent, an unbearable lightness. One person is my entire world. Where is my broad based coalition?

And money, or lack of, rears its head and militates against. How many parents in London I’ve met already of one child who must now hesitate before adding another. And for myself, the financial challenges posed by separation and raising a child alone on an average income are enough to grip my heart in fear for long and lonely moments in the night. London no longer does ‘average’, and the spectre of eventually having to leave looms. The feeling that I’m running a business sometimes descends upon me, and how much further could I be from the spontaneous joy of family life? Of more children just happening along?

If the last three years have taught me anything at all, it’s that if your partner of ten years and ten months can leave you for someone else six months before your first child is born then anything can happen. Anything. But you forget what ‘anything’ really means, sometimes…

‘It’s no more a miracle than eating food and a turd comin’ out of your ass…‘

Bill Hicks on childbirth

I’m starting to think the late, great Bill Hicks got it wrong. Childbirth is a miracle. And children are, too. Or my son is, at least. I laughed at the time, sure. After all I wasn’t the target. I was no sentimentalist like the bright eyed and bushy tailed newbie parents he lampooned, and he had a point, right? ‘There’s too many fuckin’ people in the world. Someone needs to say that…’ And I was glad it was Bill. To my mind, teetering as it was on the cusp of adulthood – it hasn’t stopped teetering yet – kids were like bad news on the TV. It happened alright, just to other people.

And now it’s happened to me, I’m back in the grip of childlike wonder. As a boy I’d gaped at textbook pictures and TV documentaries filmed in utero, agog at conception, a scene from inner space. In my febrile pre-teen imagination, it seemed utterly alien. Not hostile alien, not deep-space-stomach-bursting-humans-must-die-alien, but unknown nevertheless, wondrous and shockingly beautiful. Something from nothing. A Big Bang no less cosmic for all it’s incalculable frequency.

Soon of course, the mechanics of reproduction became apparent, and not through textbooks or the BBC. And in the wake of physical and sexual – if not mental and emotional – maturity, soon I, too, like Bill before me, was ‘wiping entire civilisations off of my stomach with a grey gym sock’. Nothing miraculous about it, quite the opposite in fact…

Leo’s eventual arrival, along with my simultaneous separation from his mother, was as tumultuous as a planetary collision and as the debris coalesced and our orbits realigned I found myself happily revolving around him, and once again in touch with the awestruck child inside me.

His very existence owed a deal to fortune. The timing couldn’t have been tighter. After seven months of trying, his conception coincided almost exactly with his mother meeting her new partner James. There’s a significance to that I’ve long since given up trying to unpick. That coincidence, entirely unbeknownst to me, accounted for the odd ambivalence in Ellie as the test brought the news, a fluctuation in her that registered with me immediately. Leo was on his way, but it felt like a ghost had entered the room. Another presence, someone other.

When, three months into the pregnancy, that presence finally revealed itself in the person of James the task at hand, even as the world swum around me, was to establish whether or not I was in fact Leo’s father. Cue tortuous phone conversations, consultation of dates and reassurances from the GP. Leo had been conceived only days before his mother’s life changed. My final act. I’d been only days from a life without him, and possibly a childless future. A parallel life now, of course, a life unlived, but one I can still catch a glimpse of on occasion. It’s the only reminder I need that Leo is miraculous. For the remaining six months there was very little sense of the miracle to come; the day to day wore in even as the seismic shifts between myself and Ellie played out. Any youthful fantasies of introducing myself to Leo as he grew inside her remained just that, as the space between us grew. I knew full well Ellie was conducting her new relationship away from home and across the city – and indeed at home when I was away – and could not bring myself to talk to him when she asked me to. What game were we playing? How was I to act? When she offered me her belly to feel him curiosity swayed me, but I reached out as a gynocologist might have done. The gesture was automated; informed by interest but joyless and robotic. All intimacy between us had evaporated, leaving me artless and clumsy in my own home.

But as I stop to consider Leo, the miracles stack up. Putting aside his conception, sadly miraculous in itself for so many less fortunate couples, what were the odds that, of all the bars in all the world, I’d walk into the one his mother worked in back in 2001? For that, indeed, was how we met. What then the odds of compatibility, never mind the lightening strike of love, intimacy – all of which seem chaotically random when you’re on the outside, however naturally they fit when you’re part of a couple? And the odds of our own respective existences? The chances that my own parents, both perhaps anxious of being left on the shelf, should run into each other in fifties London, or that two divorces would pave the way for Ellie’s parents to cross each other’s path and start again?

The existence of humanity is, in itself, a miracle of almost ludicrous magnitude when one starts to unpick the clusterbomb of coincidences that facilitated our rise. That this hunk of rock we’re still struggling to value should find itself snug in the ‘Goldilocks Zone’ of a star of just the right size, power and age to enable the creation of exactly the atmosphere required to help cook up the primordial soup and begin the evolutionary journey to us, a species capable of music and mutually assured destruction, Bach and bombs.

All coincidence, of course. Even the creation of the universe itself may be best understood as nothing more than coincidence. The right quark in the right place at the right time. Why, after all, would we describe anything as miraculous when it’s already happened, when it’s fact, when we can reach out and touch it and it’s and all we know? But if we are simply the products of maths, that’s a realisation that has limited appeal to our innate sense of story and our intuitive feeling that we’re special. In turn, that sense of our own specialness is challenged by sheer weight of numbers. We’re back to Bill and overpopulation. How can we believe in billions of miracles? Surely it’s counterintuitive…

And shrinking the scale once again, what else would I say about my own son, other than ‘he’s a miracle?’ Even if I can’t see it in the faces of all the other kids in the playground, even if they’re blobs in buggies to me, what else would I think of him? When you’re 44, innocence is a miracle. And when you can see, however fleetingly, your father in your son’s face, when that father wreaked havoc and the boy before you is bursting with all the possibilities of life, then it’s a miracle.

We forget that we’re miracles, each and every one of us. It’s necessary, even – a defence. But having a child weakens that defence, and sometimes I wonder if we’d be better off remembering – lifting the scales off our eyes, as it were, choosing love over hate just as Bill Hicks exhorted us to. He never had kids himself. He left too soon, returning to his parents home to die aged only 32. And he didn’t mean it, of course. By telling us our kids weren’t special, he was simply asking us to open up our tired eyes. He knew just how special we all are. He put it better than I ever could, ‘…the eyes of love …see all of us as one. Here’s what we can do to change the world, right now… Take all that money we spend on weapons and defences each year and instead spend it feeding and clothing and educating the poor of the world, which it would pay for many times over, not one human being excluded, and we could explore space, together, both inner and outer, forever, in peace.’ Amen.

For myself, as I sit on the edge of the sandpit with the all the other mums and the dads – pushed to the sides of our lives, as Philip Larkin had it – pushed out of my old life, out of my old future, and into this new life with nothing between me and the stars, a glimpse of the miraculous helps light the way…

Now if you’re stuck for a while consider our child
How can it be happy without its ma and pa
Please stick together
Come on, come on let’s stick together

You know we made a vow
To leave one another never

Wilbert Harrison (with thanks, of course, to Bryan Ferry)

‘Bastard’ is an awful word. However casually lobbed, however worn through overuse, it retains nonetheless its capacity, if not to shock, then certainly to hurt. ‘You were born out of wedlock’ may not be the direct translation running through the mind as it’s uttered or received, but the clarity of its barbed meaning remains… ‘you don’t belong‘. It’s not a word, so much as a weapon. By 2016 half of all British children, my son among them, will be born ‘out of wedlock’. The phrase itself, not quite yet the anachronism it deserves to be, reeks of institutionalised prejudice. But 2016 will be a significant milestone all the same and if it proves a tipping point, if we see finally that our children are to be prioritised over the institution and not vice versa, then there are grounds for optimism.

We came so very close to marriage, Ellie and I. Suitable venues, mostly large rooms above pubs, had been scouted, registry offices duly approached. Were it not for the lack of a disposable grand or two at the right moment, we certainly would have made the leap. Not that it seemed a leap to us, rather a natural progression. I don’t think we had any illusions about the importance of marriage per se, for ourselves or within society at large, other than it being a private and public declaration of commitment. And love, I suppose. Yes, there was that. That, and a good excuse for a party. We may have had some guiding notion of the proper sequence of things, some unspoken sense that it was live together, travel together, buy a flat together, have cats together, watch box sets together, get married, have kids. It needed to happen in that order, somehow.

The sudden arrival of a new love in Ellie’s life, like a deus ex machina, changed the course of the traditional plot irrevocably. And, I see now, for the better. Though we’d spoken of kids from the off, and never as a possibility but as a certainty, our eleven years together suddenly seemed an illusion to me when, three months into her pregnancy, Ellie decided her future lay with James. It was as though we had awoken from the dream. The reality of co-parenting lay ahead. Now, as the aftershocks fade, the proper sequence of things is simple. Leo comes first. And that’s it. And that’s as it should be. Marriage – theirs, or even mine, will be the icing on the cake. Certainly not the foundation.

If that sounds in any way like a simplification, it’s because it has to be. If the day-by-day remains at times a struggle, from my own point of view at least, the basics stay in place regardless. We have a child. As we sat in the kitchen amid the ruins of our own relationship with Leo three months inside her belly, like state leaders at a summit drawing up the accord that would see him through into the world, Ellie joked over tea that one day we’d be guests at each other’s weddings. I didn’t laugh, and it remains to be seen. Meanwhile as parents we’re travelling in parallel, gliding along like icebergs with very little on show to each other bar what’s necessary. Who knows what lurks beneath.

At present Leo revels in my undivided attention on one the side and bathes in the glow of their new love on the other but I wonder how important it might be for him, ultimately, to see the two of us together? Heaven forfend he should want to see us reunited, as the more naive among my male friends were convinced might inevitably be the case – as though this were a Disney rom-com with only one palatable outcome, however circuitous the route. No, he’ll need to make sense of his own story, to see the central protagonists sitting around the same table from time to time at least.

All this raced through my head during a recent handover, as Leo threw himself from one of us to the other, oblivious to the sterile space between us, propelled by joy and a love that sees no division. ‘MUMMEEE!!’ ‘DADDEEE!!’ I couldn’t help but note how curious it was that, given we all share the same space only fleetingly and at irregular intervals, how natural it seemed to him. Perhaps it was a relief? I found myself hoping, as I fastened down the Velcro straps on his trainers, that this joyful outburst wasn’t induced in some way by the uncommon triangle we made.

I’m outside of the real triangle. They form the trinity – Ellie, Leo and James, the family in the foreground with their respective extended clans populating the backdrop, delighted by the child that’s swung into their twin orbits. Either I’ve learned not to envy this or I’ve simply adjusted down through the days to a tableau that is, after all, invisible to me. Either way I’ve come to cherish the dynamic of my own immediate family – me and him. Largely free of the claustrophobia that two years ago I feared might envelop me, we enjoy in the main what can only be described as ‘quality time’. The cheap Americanism serves here as this really is a rare privilege and the movie moments, shared by us both and remembered by me alone, are coming thick and fast. No, really. But that’s another piece.

Those stagey performances around the table may become more naturally and richly inhabited in time; one can only hope so. On Leo’s second birthday – hosted on neutral ground at his grandmother’s house – I rarely escaped opening night nerves, failing to find the lines. Dry mouthed and marooned on the sofa, a stranger in a house in which I was once family, I watched on, partly with a kind of morbid curiosity, as Leo flitted between me on the periphery and the family at the centre. Every word from my mouth felt stilted, my voice as foreign to my ears as if recorded and heard on playback. The love and the tenderness I held for him as he turned two could find no natural expression and I yearned for escape, and a time when it could be the two of us once again. But time brings change with it, and there is plenty of time yet before gaps within his world become evident to him.

He’ll know his parents as wonderful individuals, but as individuals, two component parts however cooperative. The idea of us ever having been together will be illusive, impossible – and unpleasant – to grasp, the stuff of prehistory. But such is the sex life of any parent to any child. Though the mysteries of what lies between us may yet animate a febrile imagination. You don’t miss what you never knew, of course. But you may wonder. I never had grandparents. Nothing was lost. But as a child in a world generously populated with grannies and grand dads, I couldn’t help but ask myself the question, ‘what if…?’ As a couple we’ll be tucked away in Leo’s hinterland, and whether or not he turns around to look will be up to him…

Marriage may be in sight for Ellie; I’ll wish her well though doubt I’ll be in attendance. As though I’d be invited. For myself the prospect remains entirely conceptual, an oasis for now, as much the shimmering mirage as a house or a mortgage. The strain to preserve marriage for its own sake, and with it the sacred cow of traditional family life, the denial that there could be anything beyond it, can lay waste to what it seeks to defend. That was the unfortunate experience of my own childhood. I have at least the opportunity to get the order right this time; to raise and cherish a child and to build a foundation for him. I’ll put being a father first for now. In the meantime I’ll expect the unexpected, and should marriage ever find me I’ll take it for what it is – not an institution, nothing upon which to build a society, not a reason to legislate against the single parent or those who choose another way, just a chance to look her in the eye and say “I love you” in front of a lot of people.

As a father – still a single one – (and still a parent with a ‘co-‘ for a prefix) (and other brackets, sub clauses and dashes of difficulty) in a situation that remains stubbornly complex, I’m more minded than I ever thought I might be to read the myriad pearls of wisdom, received or otherwise, on offer on-line on the already overwritten subject of parenting. Frankly I never thought I’d need the advice, but that was before the ground fell away and the great unknown of single parenting yawned before me, with Leo still six months from being born. And when a particularly shiny pearl of wisdom is offered up by the estimable Lauren Laverne, I sit up and take note.

You see I love Lauren Laverne. And before she need fear the online stalker, it’s a particular love of which I speak. There are many variations, after all – the Japanese have nine words for love I’m told, though I’m not sure which would apply best in this instance. The wireless – the digital one – has become a trusted friend throughout the first 22 months of my son’s life. In the intimacy of the hearth BBC 6music has soundtracked my two-member family, and many a home alone parenting learning curve has been played out twixt ten and one to the accompaniment of Lauren’s mid-morning show.

‘Having a baby will simplify your life’ she writes in the Guardian. I sat upright for that. Your damn tootin’ it will. A baby, as Lauren points out, is the pre-eminent agent of life-simplification. I too have learnt this. With all the baggage of my childless adulthood dropped by the roadside, my toddler is now my teacher. That realisation, and the power of love (not Huey Lewis and the News’ 1985 hit single, but the actual power of love, of an order you couldn’t have dreamt could exist within you until the person you made shot out into the world and put you in your proper place) are the two things that have the power to bring down the entire parental advice machine.

I remember a frame from a Freak Brothers comic book, in which a perennial virgin finally gets it on and gets with the programme. “I CAN DO THIS!!!” shrieks our hero’s thought bubble. I’ve found it’s kind of the same with being a parent. My biggest shock was not all the staple fare of the lad-to-dad memo; the frequency of nappy changing and the fact that babies dribble and vomit and yada-yada-yada… – for some men, these seem to be discoveries akin to the detection of life on an alien planet. No, the biggest shock was that it was actually quite easy. Even doing it entirely alone for stretches of a week or more is straightforward.

And whenever I think I might slip, there’s my little genius of love to remind me how to do it, with his constant need to be fed, changed, paid for, cuddled to within an inch of his miracle of a life, bathed, taken swimming, endlessly read to with all the prerequisite voices and sound effects, and have his dad’s forehead pressed into his chest as I gabble whatever parent-child patois we’ve landed upon at that moment until his laughter is bouncing all over the walls. Leo has been a joy from pretty much the outset, and my one-on-one life with him a rare privilege.

And yet for all that, in so many respects my life remains beyond Leo’s powers of simplification. For one thing it’s split in two; life with and life without the captain of my heart. I’d happily swallowed the line that I’d have the ‘best of both worlds’, perhaps out of pure relief that my son was to remain in my life in any meaningful way at all. Now I’m not so sure. The ‘with’ bit, when it’s mostly just the two of us, is positively Panglossian – the best of all possible worlds indeed. Simple. But the downtime, well that’s exactly what it is – down time, because I’m still with him even even when he isn’t there.

Time away from Leo is time working in any case. Friends and social engagements do indeed evaporate, as Lauren, me, and millions of others have discovered. But they’re disappearing into the ether just when I need them the most. At 44, and with the vast majority of friends fully occupied with young families, I’m out on a limb. In my statistically inverted social sphere, I’m surrounded by nuclear families and suddenly I’m the only single in the village. No drinks after work when your mates are heading back to hearth and home. Opening the door to the cavernous silence that only an absent child leaves behind is chastening, and frankly frightening. One minute you’re living in the moment, the next you’re here but not here. Stop. Start. Stop. Start. And some pining in between.

Ah, family life. Or whatever you call this. You get greedy for it indeed, Lauren. But my plate keeps getting taken away. And when someone else is eating from it, well… Well.

And then there’s the juggling between two jobs and the other job that isn’t a job – the one that might be work, but you don’t want paying for and you certainly don’t want time off from. Your little boy. And there’s the childcare for him, the cost and the jigsaw of an arrangement that necessitates my dependency on Leo’s maternal family, a family of which I am no longer a part and yet remain beholden to without any support of my own to call on.

Has my son simplified my life? He’s certainly simplified me and our life together is a simple one, revolving as it does primarily around eating, reading, playing and sleeping. But the business of life is Byzantine in its complexity, each week in the shared diary a Gordian knot at the outset. My life as a single co-parent right now is a matrix of complexity, constructed in order to maintain one steady simplicity at its heart. Me and Leo. A whole lot of work for a whole lot of holiday…

So it’s upon us again. I think. Or has it just slipped by? It may have been last weekend, it may be next. It might just have well fallen in January, or be pencilled in for December – but then you probably couldn’t sell as much stuff you want but don’t need. I wouldn’t know. Apparently it’s unmissable, given the volume of media coverage, the cluster bomb of commercial opportunities and attendant advertising bonanza. In my TV-free utopia I’m (almost) blissfully ignorant, but a feature on this morning’s Woman’s Hour has the rusty penny teetering before it finally drops. I refer, of course, not to the beautiful game’s return to its spiritual home in Brazil – my utopia may be TV-less but it’s anything but football-free – no, it is, apparently, some time around now, Father’s Day. Only I’m far too busy being a father to notice…

For some of Father’s Day I will be a father. I’ll be a dad in the morning, or at least up until 11am. I’ll hoist Leo up and out of his cot at seven and he’ll run tottering into my room and hook his right foot up and over the top of my bed and we’ll read stories under the duvet until eight, each one preceded with the pomp of a now-ceremonial kiss on the cheek from him – a mutually understood bargain or a signal to begin, I’m not sure which. Then into the kitchen for a Sunday-slow breakfast and inevitably, having been lulled into a false sense of being time-rich, the pell-mell rush to Waterloo to deliver him to mum who’ll be en route to a Sunday more leisurely and reassuringly Sunday-shaped than mine. Thence across Waterloo Bridge, swallowing down the vague sense of discombobulation and mortal panic that always bubbles up like bile in the minutes after I’ve left him, to the coal face to put in a shift and thereafter to the pub with childless drinking partner to reassure myself within the span of a pint or five that my life might after all be, in some way I’m yet to notice, normal…

That’s discombobulated and panicked not simply on account of going from my hermetic existence as a full-on single parent to two days without Leo throughout which the silence he leaves behind will be deafening, but because I know my son will be spending the majority of Sunday with a man I never see but who, it would appear, considers himself to be every bit as integral to my son’s life as I am. So if this is Father’s Day, just who is it for?

‘We’ never did Father’s Day. ‘We’ being me and Leo’s mother – I retain the inverted commas as the decade-long span of our relationship seems surreal in the memory now, a montage of scenes half-remembered from another life, and not necessarily mine. Leo and I are now the only reality I know. ‘We’ didn’t do Mother’s Day either, in the interest of balance. Valentine’s Day survived the massacre and limped on in the form of a few handmade cards and some very cosy meals for two or three years. The only days deemed important enough to be granted due weight and observance were prefixed with ‘Christmas’ and ‘birth-‘. All others were derided, wisely it seemed at the time, as the spawn of American greeting card houses long since mutated into consumer-fests for fools.

But of course I’ll be his dad when he’s away on the train, when he’s in the other half of his life, when I’m rolling home drunk, when I sleep, when I wake. And this weekend, or last weekend, and however much the head says no, this proud, bruised single father is wilting just a little as he discovers that Father’s Day is pretty much ubiquitous after all, and I wonder – do I want the sweet benediction of that card after all?

Do I deserve recognition? Do I need it? On a day like today, maybe. To the pool early for Leo’s swimming lesson. ‘We’ do swimming and ‘we’ alternate – last week was mum’s turn, and when asked after me – mistakenly referred to as ‘your husband’ – by the instructor, declared ‘oh, he’s just the dad.’ That ‘just’ hung around for the rest of the day and might be worth a piece in its own right. ‘Just’ dad’s day, perhaps? There’s an almost cosmic irony in being, frankly, an exemplary father (hey, if I don’t say it who else will – that’s the whole point of this piece, right?) in as much as I do it all myself and I love doing it all myself, and being… alone. And not just alone but, without wishing to break out the violins, entirely unvalued. I guess it’s the relative isolation and the entire lack of real emotional support that has me pining for some token expression of appreciation.

Isn’t fatherhood it’s own reward? Ah, ‘its own reward’ – how that phrase might have jarred had it been suggested to me before I had a son. And yet I’d have discarded the sanctimony I wanted to hear and guessed at the truth in it, and of course I’d have been right. It is its own reward and how liberating to know and feel that each day, even if at times I do feel a little like an a one man show with an audience of …one. Though he is some audience. Very receptive.

Some dads will be feted, treated, celebrated, lionised even and sure, it would be nice. But I suspect I might breathe a sigh of relief to have given the Radiohead CDs a swerve this time.

Card or not, and let’s be fair, his crafty little digits aren’t yet two – though that hasn’t stopped him producing a glitter-encrusted Easter card courtesy of a thoughtful child-minder – I’m fortunate. Indeed, partner or not (and right now I honestly prefer not), I’m fortunate. I know there’ll come a time I can tell my son that one sun kissed Saturday I crouched down to him and kissed him as he wrestled with the high drama of end-of-day fatigue. In the kitchen with our bare feet still encrusted in the afternoon’s sand and grime, I squatted down and sang him The Byrds’ cover of Mr Tambourine Man as it played on the radio and as he nuzzled into me and we butted heads I knew I had the only show of appreciation I needed. And I marvelled just at being loved by him, and had the sense to know that these were the days of my life.

Sitting in the front room staring at the Mac, I can just about catch the frosting of my breath from the corner of one eye, and I suspect it may be cold enough to hang meat in here. My son Leo, meanwhile, is fast asleep in his cot at the foot of my bed in the back room. And, of course, he’s feeling the full benefit of the ideal temperature at which the bedroom is kept over night. Financial readjustments are already making it hard for me to justify heating any room not occupied by the light of my life. Heat is money, and its spent on my son.

Back in the icebox I’m trawling through a monumental wall of pictures, put in mind as I do so of the statistic you may have heard quoted recently, to the effect that 95% of all photos ever taken have been taken in the last five years. Or something like that – it’s a kind of a shaggy dog stat, I suppose. Who’s counting, but in any case, we get – pardon the pun – the picture.

Looking at this bank of images, I’m beginning to wonder if 95% of all photos ever taken are in fact pictures of Leo taken by me on my iPhone over the last 16 and a half months. Spread across the wide screen before me are hundreds of little Leos, in all his myriad outfits, throughout each season of the year, in states of undress and occasional distress, and in nearly all of them beaming.

These are a mere sample of the photos I’ve taken of him since his birth, some sixteen months ago. That’s 1,429 and counting – an average of 2.6 for each day of his life thus far. ‘Take one a day’ gushed my fellow fathers, and indeed the habit is now deeply ingrained – albeit somewhat to my surprise.

Nearly each and every one is a selfie, of sorts. Virtually no-one else appears in any of these shots bar Leo in the starring role and myself in support – often literally. As a visual metaphor for our lives together, that’s pretty much perfect. This is the extent of the prematurely fractured family, after all, the nucleus rent asunder – just the two of us… There is, of course, the occasional cameo – the visiting relative, the friend passing through – and the cast of extras from various playgroups. But in the main we’re the leads in this show.

The photographic record began on day one. In fact, it began much earlier, but we’ll come to that… On that day, a day which I still feel compelled to call the proudest and happiest of my life despite the events and circumstances that overshadowed it, Ellie naturally featured heavily in the photo shoot, too. The very first picture of Leo, taken moments after he’d slipped out onto the hospital bed – a shockingly skinny rag doll, red raw and too quiet by far – is a beautiful one. His pink face wrinkled as if the eldest in the room, topped with a white cap and eyes tight shut, a stranger in a strange new land, perched atop mum in blind search of his first feed.

A more naturally beautiful scene you’d be hard pushed to conjure, and yet how I’ve wished in the darker moments since – the times when I can’t find it in me to look back with unalloyed joy – to crop it, to excise her from it just as I had been exiled from my own paternal destiny. I never have, of course, it would be an abject act of miserly vandalism, a kind of small theft from all of us. Should Leo ever wish to rewind that far, if he can ever stomach viewing the vast shot-by-shot testament to his life I’ll have constructed by the time he shows any interest, he and his mum shall remain together and unedited.

But the life in montage shall of course be largely for my benefit alone. Ever since my early insistence on keeping and digitising the freeze frames from the scans, the compulsion to chronicle has grown. When we first saw those spectral little kicks inside her and let rip synchronised and involuntary gasps as we reflexively clasped hands despite it all, there was a kick inside me, too. Whatever the difficulties, a kind of freedom settled on me then. The black and white portrait fluctuating before me, to the accompanying gallop of his heartbeat, had me in its thrall. Love at first sight, inarguably, and all cares swept before it.

So what drives me is not so much the urge to capture or distil. There’s been enough recent research and general guff on the deleterious effect our urge to snap has on our future memory. By now we’ve all been at the gig where we’re distracted by the sea of raised handsets floating between us and the stage, we’ve seen tourists robotically snap exhibits they’re not even looking at. It’s a truly modern folly. We’re not allowing for memory, but rather feeding a hard drive we may never even refer to. No, what drives me is a kind of disbelief – a) that I’m actually a father, and b) that I’m actually the father of this beautiful boy.

I’d always wanted children. Of my own, that is. Overcoming indifference towards other people’s had nearly always been something of a conscious effort until Leo’s arrival. Bizarrely, I’d fantasised about being a parent even as a pre-pubescent, though when I watch kids with dolls I realise that’s perhaps not such an outlandish notion as it may at first seem. But I never quite believed that it would actually happen and now that it has, it’s as if I need constant photographic affirmation of the fact before my heretic eyes. And thanks to Steve Jobs, I’m now affirming on a daily basis. The true purpose of the iPhone, evidently, is to whip it out from your jeans pocket and show off your first born to enthusiastic, tolerant, or despairing friends whenever words fail. Which, I find, they do.

It’s the stuff of a thousand dad blogs, the big before and after story. From lad to dad. From dating to mating, and from mating to doting. The reluctance with kids that gives way to selfless adoration, as our hero stumbles upon hitherto hidden internal dimensions hitherto hidden and unguessed at. I, too, passed the parcel when it headed my way. Now the parcel’s mine. And I can barely let go.

I’d been similarly indifferent to the life photographic, both the taking of and the being in. Landscapes were routinely committed to film on my travels, and my ex would regularly point out, with some justification, that she featured less than heavily in my work behind the lens. The plea to ‘take a photo’ could freeze the blood coursing through my veins. Why halt the flow in the effort to capture it?

And yet here I am, a snap-happy daddy, a serial offender. Author of a monolithic visual record of a quite remarkable presence, a smile in 99% of its constituent shots. Each one texted between separated parents forms a bridge of sorts, and though I can only guess what Leo might ultimately make of two distinct collections, I can have no regrets. That, or I’m addicted.

But for all my marvelling at my progeny, I suspect the reasons behind my photographic rigour are quite prosaic. And perhaps a little sad. As yet, it’s still just the two of us. There’s no-one else there, no pillow talk, no comfort in shared joy or amazement. And in the absence of anything approaching a conventional family life, my guess is that I just need to prove it’s all real.

Because there are days and nights, long ones when he’s not around and I’m listless and unbalanced, when suddenly I’m a ghost haunting my own life and I need reminding I’m a dad. And I find myself staring at the Mac…

ADDENDUM (PICTURES OF HER)

There’s another wall of photos. The one I never look at. A bank of images from another life, a life as distant to me now as starlight from a far-off galaxy. The life before Leo. And what to do with these? I’ve snipped away judiciously, editing my past, whittling away but retaining the core. A decade of memories are still largely intact, and I haven’t the heart to consign them to the trash.

Some corner of me may be clinging on yet, but the stay of execution is for Leo’s benefit. It’s occurred to me more than once that he’ll have no direct experience of, nor memory of, his parents as a unit. Right now we’re doing well to be in the same room. Indeed the notion of the two of us ever having been intimate may well seem as surreal as the moon landings to him, little more than a curiosity of history.

If he asks, he’ll be answered, and the memory bank will be opened for him. He’ll see where he came from. I’ll pick some nice ones, some sunshine and smiley ones, and he’ll see that, whatever the subsequent course of our personal histories, he came from a good place. He came from love.

ADDENDUM (THE DARK SIDE OF THE MAC)

There’s another side to this Mac. Once a shared computer, it’s now my own little digital fiefdom but her half remains intact if unvisited. And there lies another wall of images yet. Time now to clean these up. These are shots not meant for my eyes. Pictures of Leo, mere days in the world and still adjusting to it, lying on the bare chest of Ellie’s partner James. His first trip outdoors since emerging from the maternity ward. It’s only the second time I’ve felt able to confront these images, and on this occasion they’re to be deleted. If only I could delete the feeling that curdles inside me.

But on this occasion Leo is with me. He’s almost 18 months now, and we’re seeing out a rainy day indoors. And from the toy-littered floor he raises his head. And he sees these images. And he says “da-dee”. And my heart stops. And it’s not happening. “Da-dee”. And in panic I hoik him up onto my lap. And this time I bring up pictures of me. His dad. “Da-dee! Da-dee!” The knot in my heart unties, I breathe a little steadier. I tell myself it’s just a word after all, an incantation of his. But hasn’t there been some kind of visual association here?

An inconvenient truth would be the correct euphemism here. Until Leo’s old enough for conversation, and perhaps past then, I am perhaps destined to be one part of a kind of composite dad, albeit the dominant part.

I click and drag James with Leo, and drop him in the trash. I pull the plug. Someone else’s memories. Pictures. Just pictures.

It’s 6.45 am and I’m standing in the kitchen making porridge. Outside all is dark, and Leo is yet to stir – such a good sleeper that I’ve learnt to hide his talent for slumber from other, less fortunate parents than I. There but for the grace of God…

Mum is away, celebrating Christmas early with her partner, leaving me to make the Monday morning run to the childminder before a dash to the West End for a last day at work before the holiday. She’ll return on Christmas Eve, in time to be with Leo for Christmas Day. Any sense of iniquity I’m harbouring is countered by the fact that Leo and I will have been together now for five out of seven nights by this evening. Still and all, ’tis the night before that’s best, and I ponder Christmas futures. Christmases when Leo will awaken to the magic, and awaken to the fact that dad is elsewhere.

Mission accomplished, and much of the rest of the day is given over to budgetary deliberations. To spend or not? An austerity Christmas, or one final fling with the plastic to ease myself through the season before battening down the hatches and sealing the wallet in the new year? Given that I’ve recently learnt I’m to emerge from six years of joint property ownership with the smallest four-figure sum imaginable, a period of retrenchment inevitably beckons with its bony finger.

And yet, it’s Christmas. It’s the season to be entirely illogical in regard to one’s finances. One look around me is all I need for a quick reminder of that. Town has emptied out somewhat, thousands fleeing from London’s lead grey skies. Inclement weather incoming. But those left on the good ship are making a scrum of it, scurrying from shop to shop like the recession never happened. Who am I not to join in the fray?

In the full and certain knowledge that I face a second successive gift-less Christmas, I cave in to self-pity and, in the nauseating and infantilising advertising argot of the day, decide to ‘treat myself’, splurging on a bottle of Evan Williams Kentucky Straight Bourbon (it’s no longer Christmas in this brave new dawn without The Pogues at Brixton and a sour mash whiskey) and a copy of Charles Schulz’s Complete Peanuts 1967-1968 – the year of its zenith, I’m assured. Added to Leo’s pile is a cuddly ‘Enormous Crocodile’, copyright the estate of Roald Dahl. Not especially enormous, or even particularly crocodiley. Retrenchment can wait.

Make the dash back south to Leo’s nan in increasingly hostile atmospheric conditions, skies apocalyptic. By 8.00 Leo is drifting off on my chest, hearing for the first time how the Grinch stole Christmas. It’s warm in here with him, and outside the wind is whipping around the flat, licking at the door and generating the near-hysterical whistling you’re more familiar with from films. Inside, the reassuring rumble of the boiler and soft whistle of Leo’s exhaling breath. Kiss his hair before laying him down between Eep-Eep and Morgan Jr. The day couldn’t end any better.

Christmas Eve

By lunchtime I’ve ferried Leo to his nan’s, and spend the rest of the afternoon facing the madness of Christmas crowds. At 23 minutes to five I’m missing him fiercely, but have at least got the shopping in under the wire. I’ve opted to have myself a Merry LIDL Christmas, and join the bazaar to toss smoked salmon, pistachios and the like into the basket for half the price.

But with the shops closed, the deadline met and the door shut behind me, the hush descends and the harder it gets. From here on in it’s all about the anticipation and the kid within me stirs – but no playmate. The problem is that I love Christmas – and if you love it, you can’t ignore it. My Christmases have evolved down the years into a ritualistic observance of traditions old and new – the obligatory pilgrimage to, and weep over, It’s A Wonderful Life, the Pogues gig, Bob Dylan’s Christmas in the Heart, the over-indulgence on Christmas Eve and the price paid in the morning. To those indifferent, I imagine it must be quite easy to ignore. But tonight the ghost of an alternate Christmas haunts – a Christmas from a parallel life, a Christmas with a family. And again, the ghost of Christmas future – Leo’s stocking prepped elsewhere… Periodically I remind myself that I don’t have to wrap his presents tonight, that I won’t actually see him tomorrow save for a conversation on Skype.

The flat may be empty, but the fridge at least is unusually full, and sleep comes easy. Waking up will be the hard part…

Christmas Day

Stepping out of the bath tub after a long soak with a glass of bourbon and half a packet of Quality Street (toffees and fudge only – finally, the prayers of those who eschew the soft centre have been answered) I reach for the iPhone by the bed. Just a reflex, I suppose, as I’m unsure who I might possibly be expecting a message from at this late hour. I see we’re seventeen minutes into Christmas Day already. Impossible as it is to ignore, right now it’s snow quiet and not a creature is stirring, but there’s no sense of anticipation, just a quiet dread that I swallow back down at intervals. Dry off and slip between the covers.

Hours later I’m staring at the curtains. Christmas Day is fingering its way around the edges. Resistance is futile, and I swing my legs over the edge of the bed. Traditional breakfast – bagels, cream cheese and smoked salmon to the accompaniment of 6music. A picture of Leo is texted over – brimming with festive glee… Then, the Skype call – mum and dad avoiding eye contact (though it’s curiously hard to look away without seeming rude or distracted on a video call…) – but soon Leo is on hand, kissing the screen in between circuits of the room, filling it with a joyful racket. For Leo, every day is Christmas… For me, he’s far away, so close…

After a hasty lunch, to Highbury Corner – I’ve volunteered to help out at a temporary shelter for the homeless run by the Quakers. Wheeling north up bus lanes without buses, weaving through tourists on Boris Bikes, I’m still unsure as to what’s motivating me, or what I may be hoping to get out of the day. This is a first for me – I confess I’m not the type to volunteer ordinarily, and could hardly even classify myself as being charitably inclined. Indeed I’ve even on occasion suspected that a great deal of charity is about the feelings of the giver rather than the benefit of the recipient.

The inescapable truth is that I have nothing to do on Christmas Day. My son is with my ex, family are outside of London and in no circumstances would I consider throwing myself at the mercy of friends, who are en famille to a man. Rather than act the Christmas gooseberry, I’m intent on turning the situation around and focusing on someone else. On the final approach along Upper Street I realise I’m afraid, and now I know why. Without a family home and with barely a penny to show for it, I’m living in a flat I could conceivably lose at any point, and with an annual income of less than £25,000 and considerable debt face the prospect of housing myself and my son in London, where the private rental market is tearing strips off of couples and families. Paranoia? I hope so, but on the days that chew at me days homelessness can loom in the rear view mirror.

Hours at the kitchen sink with Gill help me overcome my nerves. She’s a cheery and determined middle-aged divorcee who’s maintained a close friendship with her ex. I’m all ears. We cope with the brunt of a hundred-plus Christmas dinners, occasionally mingling with those we’re here to serve. There are the alcoholics and habitual drug-users, and the victims of life-derailing childhoods. There are men accompanied by dogs who’ve offered them more solace than any human. Some seem haunted by the men they might have been. One man sits hunched throughout, intent on a copy of Economics Explained. I wonder whether he’s asking how he got her or looking for the way out. I hope he finds enlightenment.

At five o’clock I’m sent on a mercy mission – with forty quid in my pocket I’m dispatched to find two carving knives. I haven’t the heart to question the likelihood of finding a pair of knives on Upper Street on Christmas Day so gamely set off with the hopes of all resting on me. Make it as far as the 24-hour Co-op garage where my request has a carful of patrolling policemen in stitches. On hearing the dilemma, they suggest sharpening the knives we have blade-to-blade, cliche French chef-style. I sprint back and we make like Boy Scouts. Christmas is saved.

The workload hits a critical mass after dinner and though I flag, my spirits are high and I realise I’ve made the right choice in coming along. I may have set out to do something for myself – ie distract myself from a Leo-less Christmas – but in doing so I’ve given of myself, putting my shoulder to the wheel for the benefit of others. And it feels good. All around is cheery chaos, only the dogs are fighting. Merry Christmas, we wish each other over hot chocolate.

At the debrief we’re invited to finish in silent prayer. It’s then I realise that I’m the only non-Quaker in the room and as their eyes close or meet the floor, I allow my faithless gaze to study for a moment the faces I’ve been working with. Good souls, all. No piety or sense of self-satisfaction. No-one has asked them to give of their time on Christmas Day, and they’ve asked nothing in return. If there is such a thing as the spirit of Christmas, I suspect it may have just passed through this draughty room.

Feel sufficiently emboldened to yell a full-lunged Jimmy Stewart-style ‘Merry Christmas everybody!’ as I set off down the side streets of well-heeled Islington. Cross back over the river as the weather becomes biblical and all the rain in the world is hurled at me, and the driving gets festive. Plunge into a waterlogged pothole in Brixton, and bike frame meets groin with force. Home by midnight. Bath, bourbon, Quality Streets, bed.

Tomorrow, Boxing Day is Christmas Day.

Boxing Day

Or Groundhog Day. At least until Leo arrives. Languish in the half light of the pit until 9.30 before dragging my bones into the kitchen for a repeat of yesterday’s breakfast. Time enough for a whistle stop tour of the encircling Sainsbury’s locals in search of brandy butter. Success. Before long Leo is trundling down the steps in buggy, mum behind. It’s business as usual in the kitchen – a quick drop-off, a quick ‘how was yesterday?’, then Ellie to work and Leo and I are left to turn, belatedly, to matters Christmas. It takes a few moments for me to realise that not one seasonal greeting of any variety has passed between Ellie and I. We’re still locked in an ice age…

The remainder of the day is spent in the kitchen, and though of a decent size it seems to shrink as the hours pass. Leo bounces happily between me and the cupboards for the duration, but learning to cook a ham with a toddler in a space like this is not an experience I’ll be in a rush to repeat. One eye on Leo and one eye on the ham is not enough eyes. Pull a tile from a fridge magnet poetry set out of his mouth and waste precious time confiscating the whole set from off of the fridge door. Suspect the word ‘fusillade’ may well be working its way around his digestive tract as i do so. It’ll all come out in the nappies… With the giant fist of meat finally glazed and in the roasting tray, I take the opportunity to lay Leo down for a brief siesta.

We’re interrupted by a thump from the general direction of the oven. It’s a thump with a metallic undertone and I assume it’s the sound of a roasting tin readjusting to life under heat. I’m wrong. Leaving Leo to doze I return to the kitchen to find that the ham has exploded. The picture behind the glass door is an ugly one, reminiscent of the meaty mess left in the teleporter pod in the closing scenes of David Cronenberg’s cult shockfest The Fly, in which Seth Brundle attempts and fails to rid himself of the insect DNA that’s making life so inconvenient. For a moment I’m scared to open it. On doing so, a fleshy apocalypse reveals itself. Matter coats the inside of the door and charred gristle is welded to the inside walls. Refusing to buckle, I drain the oil from the beast, have a hasty clean up, turn down the gas a little and resume the experiment, fingers crossed all the while.

After dinner bedtime beckons for Leo, and I hoik him up onto the big bed for his first e-book on the iPad – Lemony Snicket’s The Dark, a beautifully illustrated story of a young boy’s coming to terms with his fear of the dark and a delight to read aloud, voices and everything. Once he’s slipped from shallow sleep into the deep and true stuff, I slip next door to my own dinner and a robust red. After a day of cooking the unventilated kitchen resembles a sweat shop, rivulets of meat infused moisture coursing down the walls. Approaching midnight on Boxing Day now and still not a present wrapped. Grab a bourbon and the half-full box of Quality Street to help as I remedy this, and in short order I’m stealing back into the bedroom as he breathes in and breathes out, and I rest an armful of silver-wrapped toys on the floor at the foot of his cot.

The day is soon fingering its way around the curtains once more, but it’s no Groundhog Day. Here’s Leo, standing up in his cot, head peering over the footboards, calling for me. I sweep him up with one arm, gather his presents in the other, and we bundle onto the bed for the big unwrap. Carefully sourced toys are duly discarded, and Leo is soon revelling in piles of the best wrapping paper he’s seen in his life. And he’s learnt a new trick. A kiss for dad. Merry Christmas, son.

Subsequent investigations revealed that the ham should in fact have had its skin removed before its fateful journey in my oven. Beginner’s mistake. It was, however, all kinds of sensational…